Int. J. Forensic Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2017 303 Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Copy-Move forgery detection in images using grey- level run length matrix features Saba Mushtaq* and Ajaz Hussain Mir Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Srinagar, J&K 190006, India Email: sab.mushtaq@gmail.com Email: ahmir@rediffmail.com *Corresponding author Abstract: Copy-move detection also known as region duplication detection is a well-recognised and active area of research owing to great demand of authenticating genuineness of images. Currently available techniques for copy- move detection fail to accurately locate the tampered region and lack robustness against common post-processing operations like compression, blurring and brightness changes. This paper proposes a novel technique for detection and localisation of copy-move regions in image using grey-level run length matrix (GLRLM) features. In the proposed method, we first divide the forged image into overlapping blocks and GLRLM features are calculated for each block. Features calculated for each block form feature vectors. Feature vectors thus obtained are lexicographically sorted. Blocks with similar features are identified using Euclidean feature distances. Post-processing isolates similar blocks. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme to locate copy-move forgery and robustness against operations like jpeg compression, blurring and contrast adjustments. Keywords: Copy-Move; digital image forgery; forgery in images; GLRLM; image forensics; passive authentication; texture features. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Mushtaq, S. and Mir, A.H. (2017) ‘Copy-Move forgery detection in images using grey-level run length matrix features’, Int. J. Forensic Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp.303–318. Biographical notes: Saba Mushtaq received BE in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Kashmir University, India in 2008. She obtained MTech in Communication and Information Technology from National Institute of Technology, Srinagar, India in 2012. She joined NIT Srinagar in September 2012 as a faculty member. Currently, she is a Research Scholar at NIT Srinagar in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering. Her research interests are image processing, image forensics and biometrics. Ajaz Hussain Mir received BE in Electrical Engineering with specialisation in Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE). He did MTech in Computer Technology and PhD both from IIT Delhi in 1989 and 1996, respectively. He is the Chief Investigator of Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Govt. of India project: Information Security Education and Awareness (ISEA). He has been guiding PhD and MTech theses in security and other related areas and has a number of International publications to his credit. Currently, he is working as a Professor in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering at NIT Srinagar, India. His areas of interest are biometrics, image processing, security, wireless communication and networks.